5 Social Media Top Tips

The 5 ingredients of shareable content

In a Nutshell…
1. Get to know your audience and understand what is important to them.
2. Create content that is valuable, relevant and consistent.
3. Set a goal and a call to action for every piece of content you produce.
4. Speak your community’s language.
5. Optimize your headlines for shareability.

People will share content that is useful, entertaining and relevant to connect with you but also nurture connections with their audience. They want to come across as up-to-date with all the latest news in their niche and they want to feel part of something bigger as much as you do.

So what does this mean in practice? A few possible types of posts that have proven to work well on social media are posts that offer information and knowledge such as a guide, a research or an infographic and incorporate all or a mix of these ingredients:

1. Audience

It all starts with your audience. The more information you have about what makes them tick and what they are talking about on social media, the more targeted and relevant your content will be.

2. Goal

Remember that every single social media post is a micro campaign in itself with a target audience, a goal and certain KPIs. So before you post a message, think about your goal and optimize your post accordingly.

For example, on Twitter, posts with images drive more engagement, according to research. Therefore, if content amplification is your goal, you should make sure that your tweet contains a visual.

3. Call to action

Your marketing campaigns have a call to action most of the time and so should your social media posts. Explain people what you want them to do whether it is to read, share or comment on something. Social media scientist Dan Zarrella has found that calls to action on social media actually workand lead to the desired examples.

4. Tone

People share content that reaches them in a human, personal way. So this means that it is important for your content to have a human, personal tone so that people can relate and feel that they are part of a community. As the Cornell study showed, one of the reason why social posts are shared is because they ‘speak’ the language of the community.

5. Shareable headlines

I’m sure you’ve heard about the clickbait phenomenon that makes certain stories to get shared like crazy. I’m not saying all your future headlines should start with “You won’t believe what happened to this guy” but there are certain ways to make sure your content is optimized for social shares.

Headilines should have an emotional value… and then they’ll be more shareable.